


a tide in the affairs of men

by oonaseckar



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon, M/M, Ralph has a lot of plans and a list, Time Travel, WWII, let's kill Hitler!, machiavellian!Hazell, man plans and God laughs, teen!Laurie, teen!Ralph
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-10-22
Updated: 2015-10-22
Packaged: 2018-04-27 13:55:23
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5051032
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/oonaseckar/pseuds/oonaseckar
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Ralph wakes up in 1932, whole, seventeen years old and back at school.  No-one else appears to have noticed.  It's a once - twice? - in a lifetime opportunity.  And he can probably tick a few items off his to-do list, while he's at it.</p>
            </blockquote>





	a tide in the affairs of men

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by Anonymous in the [TC_Trope_Fest](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/TC_Trope_Fest) collection. 



> ****  
>    
>  **Prompt:**   
>  **Ralph goes to sleep in 1940 and wakes up in 32 with his memories intact.**
> 
>  
> 
>  
> 
> Well. Thank you for the prompt, it was fun. I could not resist the utterly obvious: but in what universe would a time-travelling Ralph not start making plans to kill Hitler?
> 
> There is, I admit, a barely-there offstage Mr Stuart here, and a bit more Hazell than I was expecting. A MILLION APOLOGIES!
> 
> There's also some Hazell/Laurie that you don't have to squint much at all to perceive. Why has this never occurred to me before? Why is there not Hazell/Laurie all over the fandom? Seriously, let me quote: "He hated you. Didn't you know?" METHINKS THE LADY DOTH PROTEST TOO MUCH. A THIN LINE BETWEEN LOVE AND HATE. And getting off with the rival as a substitute for the love-object. I'm not kidding around. This is _blatant._
> 
> I haven't warned: there's no graphic violence or underage as such, everything's offstage. Presumption is all. Also there's about the level of cultural and racial awareness you'd expect of the times.
> 
> Every other fandom has killed off Hitler. I don't see why TC should shirk its responsibilities.

There's a list of things he has to tick off, before he can perform his mission. Not all of them are about acquiring the appropriate equipment, or necessary logistical arrangements. Some are purely personal: but Ralph thinks it's justifiable. It's important to put a few things to rest, to settle old scores. To put right what he can from his personal ledger, before he enlists in an army of one, and performs a more impersonal act of duty to the species.

In no particular order, then.

i) Mr Stuart has a fondness for the pre-Raphaelites. And the one thing of value that Ralph personally possesses, is a little oil-painting of Elizabeth Siddal in a particularly gingery glory, left him by his grandmother. It takes all kinds of jumping through hoops, and forging his parents' signatures on an item release form, and lying to his granda's solicitors. But finally, he has his hands on it. He breaks into Mr Stuart's study – the last thing he does, before hoisting his metaphorical stick and kerchief aloft over his shoulder, and bidding adieu to the old firm. And he leaves the painting on Stuart's desk, no note. He's failed to say goodbye to too many people. Actions will have to count for something. 

It's not going to do him any good where he's going. And Mr Stuart has to deal with Mr Jepson as a colleague. He deserves some compensation. Especially as Ralph lifts his old service revolver, inherited from a brother in the Great War, at the same time. It's far from ideal – considering the wobble in the cylinder and the strictly limited ammo stored with it – but it's better than his pocket knife and the starter pistol from the lower school track and field events, or trying to abstract a rifle from the carefully monitored ROTC gun cupboard. (Or to carry it discreetly, where he's going.) 

ii) He calls Spuddy to his study, via that human Robin Goodfellow Barnes' agency, on the excuse of a mucked-up prefect rota. (Christ, and it's excruciating to see him, young and whole and completely clueless about _everything_. It makes Ralph wish he'd lifted Stuart's untouched bottle of Gordon's, too. But he has a seventeen-year-old virgin liver, _gratis_ , a gift – as well as two good hands, which he can't refrain from continuously unconsciously flexing. And a job to do. There's no excuse for it.) He gives the lad some old guff about a mix-up with the paperwork, about hauling him in for a discussion of this year's dramatic production too, which Spuddy takes in open-mouthed and earnest. He's so sweetly credulous, Ralph could kiss him for it.

“Anyway, I'm throwing some things out, and I thought you might like this,” he says then, fairly brusque, what with the awful tangle of undisciplined emotion. It's the Phaedrus, of course: not new, but dark and crisp-paged and immaculate. It's a very different object to the state it was in the last time he laid eyes on it, all the blood and salt of Dunkirk soaked into its pages. It feels like he's completing a loop, keeping a tradition, fulfilling the exacting terms of a superstition, to give it to Spuddy again. Anything might happen now, of course: he's setting the course of events all askew. But one never knows...

It might bring Spuddy back to him, an _aide-memoire_ , a trail of crumbs back to the source. But Spuddy's smile and his hands on the title page, the dedication, sets off some impulse in Ralph. It's the pin out of the grenade. And then he's backing the boy into a corner – no explanation, no build-up, no words. No intimidation, either, and Spud's face is more bewildered than unnerved: but cornered up between a bookshelf and an armchair, he straightens his spine suddenly, and looks Ralph in the eye.

Not defiance, no, just resolve. Assuming he's done wrong somehow, and standing straight to meet the consequences. Oh dear, oh Spud. Ralph kisses him for _that_ , it's the best explanation and apology he can manage. And gets more carried away than he meant, even on impulse. Lets himself go a bit, in fact, when Spud's frozen disbelief under his hands and mouth relaxes, becomes a tentative and half-embarrassed response. 

There, job done. And when he pulls back, there's more protest in that questingly open freckled face, than intimidation or worry. (Spud isn't pulling away. His hands go up in instinctive correction, they wordlessly gesture something that says quite eloquently, _that was nice, how about another go-round?_ ) It's a boost to the ego to have him left speechless, though. (Laurie – as opposed to Spud – does talk an awful lot, and sometimes arrant nonsense.) “Um,” he says, eyes flitting a bit but reliably coming back to Ralph. *I–”

“Get along, Odell,” Ralph says. “I've got things to do.”

The tone is perfect – he hasn't lost the knack at all, how would he with how many years at sea? (Or none at all, but between the lower school and scurvy dog matelots, there's sometimes barely a hair's breadth.) Laurie responds instinctively to the command, however flustered. He does give one look back at the door, though, twisting his long ink-stained hands together in mystification, and it's pure wordless appeal.

“Don't forget your book,” Ralph says, and there's a silent, charged moment as Spud dives back in for it. He hesitates a moment, lingering for any further interesting developments, then careers off like a startled rabbit.

He won't forget _that_ in a hurry, Ralph thinks, as the study door closes. Let him come back in a few years and tell me about his boyfriend _now._

iii) He has to deal with Hazell too. Can't very well allow himself to flinch away from the task. When the little chancer knocks at the study door, he's got it all set out in his mind, ordering his breathing, controlling his natural emotional responses, reminding himself of a thing or two. The little bastard really did have a rotten start, probably didn't think through consequences. Ralph himself was hardly a paragon in the whole affair, after all. If they can tick off a few noteworthy points, establish a few things and part with goodwill on both sides, then it will be a bonus to this whole affair. And maybe set Hazell on a path that doesn't wind up in prison or on celluloid.

The little swine won't stop smirking and giving Ralph huge, starry, wistful eyes when he turns up, of course. Really it would help if Ralph could remember, from a distance of this many years, exactly what stage they're at of their sordid little liaison, at this point in the summer term, 1932. Clearly, from how close Hazell stands, it's fairly well along. (And from how he manages to trail a toe up Ralph's calf, and do a creditable job of making it look as far accidental as such a manoeuvre can possibly be, before Ralph firmly puts the menace away from him bodily.) It doesn't stop Ralph from laying hands on him to sit him down on the window-seat, and give him a lecture about community and responsibility and duty. And a slideshow, too, if he had one. It seems equitable, somehow. He doesn't forget that in a sense he owes Hazell, rather more than Spud. He didn't have much sense of injury to cultivate at the time. He'd known full well he'd gone looking for trouble, and found it. And still less, with the distance of years. He might have been the more ruined, but was still the more culpable.

“It's important to understand your position and your responsibilities,” he's saying to Hazell. It's amazing that he suddenly, earnestly means it. “You can't just rely on me pulling you out of hot water, when you've failed to pull your weight and do what you can to contribute to the school.” He doesn't stop there either. He pulls out all the stops, gives it all the womb of home and duty and a mother's tears.

(It should be very emotional and impressive. If anyone had given him this speech at fifteen, he might have swallowed a lump in the throat and stood to salute the King and begin the national anthem, before declaiming a bit of Kipling and Gloriana, possibly hammering away at Henry V and St. Crispin's Day too.) 

Hazell isn't singing, though. He's squinting at Ralph through pretty, malicious green eyes, unengaged, a fish slipping through a hole in the net. Suspicious, detached and inquisitive. “Are you up to something, Lanyon?” he asks pleasantly, with a steel-plated _savoir-faire_ that suggests, objectionably, that he feels he has licence for a bit of liberty-taking and speaking his mind freely. His brow creases up, and he looks still more like a teenage Albert Campion on the trail of a jewel thief. “Are you running off to sea or something? You're talking just like my brother to my old mum, when he ran off to join the army - instead of getting articled to the dump in the City my uncle could've got him in with. To save the Empire from upstart Huns and bolshy natives, if he had to lay down his bally life to do it. As he put it. Father would have tanned his hide, if he'd had an inkling of it beforehand, if anyone had been keeping an eye on the idiot. Anyone he hadn't sweetened up with his weekly allowance and a few significant trinkets, anyway. I got a nice Kodak Brownie and a wristwatch out of the deal, a very sweet inducement.” 

Then his expression lightens from a contemptuous brood, and becomes so distinctly more calculating that Ralph shivers, undetectably. “I wonder what I could get out of this, with you out of the picture. Do you think Odell might discover his libido, even abandon his moral rectitude and all the patronising little encouragements whenever I manage an overarm bowl? Those swimming trunks, eh, the ones he thinks streamline him enough to give him an edge in competition? Oh, don't give me that look. I've seen _you_ looking – _Ralph_. Do you think you're the only one? With you out of the picture, I might get more out of him than a pat on the head like I'm a ruddy dog, while he watches you on the cricket field and doesn't even know why he's so flipping stuck on you. Divide and conquer, and all that. D'you think he's virgin territory?”

It's all a bit of a blur after that – famous last words – but Ralph is pretty sure that repeating ancient history and resorting to the cane again is a personal failure. One that is going to absolutely require extinguishing the foremost threat to human decency on the planet right now, to wipe it out. It's almost irrelevant that he feels a lot worse about it than Hazell, apparently. Who straightens up, not noticeably uncomfortable. (Something of an insult to Ralph's prowess: but then, if you're wired that way, Ralph supposes, it takes off something of the sting. It has to explain something: he's pretty sure he genuinely wasn't wired that way himself, first time around. There has to be something, to explain his response when Hazell grabs the front of his shirt, flushed and pleased and almost black-eyed, and garbles something utterly trite about _amuse-bouches_ and the main course, that Ralph isn't going to dignify by setting it down in ink.

This is where Ralph abruptly draws the mental blinds. Damned if _this_ is going in the journal. 

iv) Done and dusted, and with someone having received a salutary lesson – Ralph flinches away, pulls himself together, and pays a visit to his amenable and discreet local, to settle his tab. He can't believe he has a tab. How does he have a tab? He's _seventeen_. Maybe Laurie has a point.

v) And he picks up a copy of _The Time Machine_ , on an expedition into town, because he'll have a bit of a journey getting where he's going, and he'll need reading material off and on. He's pretty sure Socrates isn't going to do the job. Also _Crime and Punishment_ , also a spot of Wodehouse, also Sacher Masoch, also Ethel M. Dell.

Ralph isn't going to dignify your enquiries with further elaboration.

vi) Ralph tries to look up Alec. There isn't really time – before he signs on with the commercial fishing vessel his drinking pal of last summer has got him in with, before he finishes his researches, fine-tunes his tools and his plans, and says goodbye to a familiar time-line. But he thinks of Alec, and he tries anyway. The small private school where Alec ought to be signed up as a dayboy has an extraordinarily hard-headed bursar, and headmaster too: neither of them susceptible to charm or elaborate explanation, catching on quickly to telephonic deception that would fool Jeepers with a little technical jargon and sufficient bluff confidence. He gives up the attempt, since detection and explanation, and incarceration in an asylum, would arrest his plans quite inconveniently.

It's all wrong, though. There's something wrong with any universe where he's not quietly conscious of Alec, set somewhere nor' nor' west of his own headlong relentless career onward, and radiating faintly irritable sanity. How is he supposed to steer and navigate without that guiding star?

vii) He doesn't try to look up Sandy.

viii) Down to Portsmouth, he drops in on his parents days early for the summer vac, with the excuse of exam results in and a flu bug keeping the sicker busy, for leaving early. It's a matter of formal duty, not as if he relishes it. If he's changing history forever, and might disappear from it in the process, then he owes them one last chance to say goodbye. Even if all goodbyes are over, as far as he's concerned.

And his father is in his study, where he allegedly reads and deals with business, much as usual from dim half-hearted memories before prep school. His father: the associations are dutiful appearances at the local Infants and Juniors back in the mists of time, for ceremonial school events, plus dragging a numbly, compliantly bored and inattentive infant Ralph off to service after service, mostly due to his wife's abjurations. He has a cheap detective novel in his hand, as he comes out to see what Mrs Jellie, who comes in to 'do' twice a week, is complaining about. (She's complaining about Ralph's backpack in the doorway, and his muddy boots in the hall.) A bald greeting is followed by an enquiry about what he's doing there, even though they're forewarned. And fully informed of Ralph's cover story (again), he pronounces, “Ah. Well, your mother will deal with it. She's staying overnight at your aunt's for the summer fête. Don't make any extra work for Mrs Jellie.” He shuffles back into his own den, and that's done.

Ralph stays for thirty-six hours, at which point his mother's return is still promised and awaited. She hasn't run off with the milkman, he's pretty sure: it's not a cover story of his father's own, just plain fact. She'll arrive eventually, and he could quite easily stay longer. Austrian housepainters notwithstanding, his schedule's not such that he couldn't put his departure off a few days.

But he feels like he's done his duty. He re-packs his bag, and leaves.

iv) He mentions to Barnes, in passing and _a propos_ of nothing, that catching a single one alone, the smallest, and beating the crap out of him, will get him a lot further than whining for mercy from the whole howling pack of hyenas. He gets a vacant, drop-lipped look in return, and wishes he hadn't bothered.

x) He considers Jepson a good deal. The incompetent ass is doing his best to ruin the House, of course. And considering how long Ralph has left, before his farewell scene and quitting the stage, he could perhaps do something about that. But anything he might do feels so tainted with personal vendetta, that he hesitates. And finally he thinks that Spuddy will hold it together, once he's running the show, can withstand any of the old buffer's idiocies. There's a sentimental pride attached to the thought, that he doesn't even trouble to feel embarrassment over.

xi) He goes to see Charlie Chaplin at the ABC in town, his next to last day before flight, before everything's irrevocably otherwise forever. The Saturday morning matinee, and then he sits through _City Lights_ , and they have _The Kid_ , too. It's a pity he's eight years early for _The Great Dictator_ , but he can remember it pretty well anyway. He's sorely tempted to find a specious excuse to drag Spuddy along, to hunch close in the dark in an innocence he'll have to remember and hug close later, when he's dealing with colder more businesslike affairs. But he resists, and only laughs and sheds a few tears alone.

xii) If there was still time he might have looked up Bim. Or even Bunny, Christ's sake. His reservoir of sentimental tolerance is expanding to a terrifying degree. Suddenly practically ninety percent of humanity seem at least redeemable. Barring certain obvious exceptions, hence his mission. But there isn't time. He's run out of time.

xiii) He wishes his German was better. Every spare moment not devoted to useless personal attachments and old lost broken dreams, goes to study.

Last on the list: He tries to get a hold of Alec, one last time.

 

**ADDITIONAL NOTES**  
a) He doesn't spend any time wondering how, or why, when he wakes up seventeen again, a schoolboy again. Gift horses, etc., but not only that. Barring delusions and insanity as options, it's a tremendous opportunity. If he wastes it with indecision and finicking doubting researches, querulous philosophical musings, then he ought to be blotted out, his name extinguished from the rolls of human effort and experience forever. He'd be ashamed.

Of course, it might make no difference in the end. He does spare a thought, here and there, for fixed points, and the possibility that he'll just shove events onto a different route to the same destination. It hardly seems sufficient excuse to do nothing, though.

b) He spends about four days electrically, continually aware of his hand – his good hand, that wasn't before. Or after – terminology has become confusing. He stares at it longer and oftener than is reasonable, obsessed. 

On the fifth day he wakes up and lifts both hands up in the air, above the sheets. It's just two hands. Tools, equipment, the equipment he has to do the deed. Time to stop staring at them like an infatuated lover, as if his individual particular self was so significant, was the whole world. As if his pain means everyone should scream forever, like no-one's ever had worse. Work to do. There's work to do.


End file.
